


The End Of The World Was Long Ago

by eye_of_a_cat



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen, Kobol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 00:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14780190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eye_of_a_cat/pseuds/eye_of_a_cat
Summary: Kobol's children are killing each other.





	The End Of The World Was Long Ago

**Author's Note:**

> For the end of the world was long ago  
> And all we dwell today  
> As children of some second birth  
> Like a strange people left on earth  
> After a judgment day.  
> \- G. K. Chesterton

It's the light she sees first, through the eyes of all her children. It bathes the land in butter-gold as the night's creatures curl into dark hollows, and the day's wake and stretch while leaves turn slowly, slowly towards the sun. Kobol breathes in the sighs of waves hitting shore, and watches.  
  
The children treading this earth for the first time believe they are orphans. Their ancestors' ancestors cursed her once, scattered themselves among the cold stars and called other worlds home. They are lost, they have forgotten; they do not understand why she reminds them of nightmares, nor why they want so much to stay. The leaf-mould sinks beneath their feet, and through it she feels them flinch.  
  
So lost, and for so long.   
  
Kobol's children are killing each other, their blood soaking down into thread-fine roots of grasses; all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. She whispers to them in streams of wind, and they see the granite-slab altars, the stacks of skulls long since dissolved in rainwater, and know this was always a place of death, just as it was always a place of life. They turn away, close their eyes, horrified. But Kobol's children kill each other in every moment: wolves pull down deer, ants bite into leaves, bacteria swarm over a dying fish, and all death is a sacrifice.  
  
That these are all her children, flesh or metal, she never doubts. This is a cold, sterile universe, and they live.  
  
Kobol has been dreaming for a long time now, for all the years these children have been gone. She shares pieces of her dreams with them: a temple, white stone, a drowned child. When they wake, shaken and terrified, she soothes them with the lullaby of wind in tall grasses. Kobol's children fear her now, but not enough to turn back.  
  
What she feels from them is loss, and the shock of that loss still sharp broken pieces inside them. Anger, for their dead worlds, no less than it ever was. And fear. Always, fear. They do not think of themselves as her children, now; they believe their worlds were the only worlds, and their loss was the only loss, and they fear her without knowing why.  
  
In their own dreams, they remember pieces of stories and no more. To them, their war and their exile were the story itself; they never think of they, themselves, as a forgotten epilogue. But Kobol remembers the Twelve, the wars, the struggling gods, and watches these children try to make sense out of the fragments left. Their war was her war, long ago, although they believe it immediate and theirs alone. All of this has happened before.  
  
Feeling them move across the land, she knows she will guide them. They have some of the pieces, after all, and although they still lift the rain-drenched pages of a holy book from the ground, believing its words are more than words without this earth to sink into, it will be enough. She will show them Athena's tomb, and the arrow of Apollo, and for moments - days, maybe - they will feel her stories with her.  
  
Days. Maybe. Until the cold of space swallows them again, and they forget.  
  
Kobol will watch them leave the way she watched them return, with the patience of millennia. Long, long years are still to pass before her children come home.


End file.
